Book Review: Einstein’s Mistakes: The Human Failings of Genius by Hans C. Ohanian (2008)
As one of the jacket blurbs on this book suggests, never mind Einstein’s mistakes, Ohanian made a mistake in his title. His book is about a great deal more than Einstein’s mistakes (though he covers the errors splendidly). In fact, it is about a great deal more than Einstein. It is perhaps the best exposition of early twentieth century science—the age that gave us relativity and quantum theory—that I have ever seen. This is a marvelous book. Its prose is as clear and understandable as Einstein’s mystical musings often were not. Incredibly rare in a scientist, or even in a scientific writer or journalist, Ohanian keenly understands, all at once, the explanations of nature the physicists proffered, the mathematics they used in making their explanations, and the compulsions and idiosyncrasies of the personalities behind the discoveries. Ohanian beautifully leverages his encyclopedic mind to weave a fascinating tale of early twentieth century science as might be told from Einstein’s perspective, if Einstein were capable of objectively observing himself. Ohanian is so intimately familiar with the details of particular events, it seems he had to have been there, peeking over Einstein’s shoulder when, for example, Einstein again failed to make viable his mathematical proof of his famous mass-energy equivalence (energy=mass multiplied by the square of the speed of light, or more simply, E=mc-squared).
The book within this book cataloguing the history of early twentieth-century physics is a biography of Einstein, but not of the fawning variety so commonly found emanating from the echo chamber of stale ideas that has become modern-day theoretical physics. The biographical sketches mostly concern Einstein’s professional life, but have more than a few juicy personal morsels thrown in for good measure. Ohanian weaves the biography into the fabric of excitement and awe blanketing the age of scientific discovery and conquest in which Einstein lived.
I was initially drawn by the title, Einstein’s Mistakes. I am always skeptical of what appear to be deified human beings; I do not believe anyone is a so extraordinary they should be elevated to the status of demigod, as it appears is the case with so many of today’s physical theorists in their consideration of Einstein. More often than not, the acclaim afforded cultural icons like Einstein reveals more about the humans bestowing it than the attributes of the individual upon which it is bestowed, Einstein being no exception. Surely Einstein had made mistakes. I figured that understanding Einstein’s human mistakes might allow me to relate to the man and his unique perspectives on a more human level.
I’ve come to understand that Einstein was something like Voltaire’s God: Had he not existed, it would have been necessary to invent him. In a manner of speaking, that is precisely what we did. We needed a face to put to the surreal, counter-intuitive ways of understanding the universe that began, trickling at first, and eventually, flooding into mainstream society from the frontiers of scientific discovery in the early twentieth century. Einstein’s mad-scientist countenance–deeply penetrating eyes staring out from a chaotic mess of unruly hair and mustache; his disregard for sartorial etiquette; his ready command of language and the ability to offer off-the-cuff pithy observations on the nature of the universe; these all combined to make his the perfect face and personality to represent this new age of scientific understanding. Those calm eyes; dark, liquid pools of deep understanding, stared at us out of his otherwise chaotic visage, making a perfect metaphor for the manner with which humanity was methodically deciphering the similarly chaotic mysteries of nature through nothing more than the power of abstract thinking.
Einstein was one of a great many geniuses (it must always be remembered that genius is, like Einstein considered all else in the universe, a matter of relativity) plowing the fields at the leading edges of the scientific frontier. He was by no means the only one, nor necessarily the greatest one, but he had a certain unique intuition and roguish rebelliousness that often allowed him to see further and understand more deeply the meanings to be assigned to the discoveries being made. Even so, Special and General Relativity, the two theories for which Einstein is most celebrated today, were not experimentally derived. They were products of the furrows in his mind. In their final compositions, they were almost pure abstractions whose predictions of real-world phenomenon were ultimately proved true only after the fact. To the layman in an age when scientific materialism was rapidly replacing secular religion as the reigning theology, it seemed that Einstein understood better than anyone the mind of the materialistic God in the design of the universe; if in fact Einstein had not designed the universe himself, he seemed intimately close to the one that had. Einstein was the Moses of scientific materialism, hearing God’s voice through the bush that burned but was never consumed.
Though Einstein was hardly the only theoretician capable of deducing the nature of the universe through abstract thinking and applied mathematics, he was the one whose gift the public most celebrated, and for good reason, he was one of its most gifted practitioners. Nowadays, every theoretician in the world, particularly those of the string theorist variety, is something of an Einsteinian Pythagorean, believing the music of the spheres to be composed of numbers and resolvable through mathematical abstractions. Yet all the ferocious calculations in the century since General Relativity first appeared have failed to reveal what are, if any, the numbers and equations encompassing the essence of reality. There still is nothing to unify the universe, except gravity, and we still don’t fully understand it.
Of course, I was wrong about the title, but not so much about Einstein’s deification. Ohanian has no mind to tearing down Einstein’s ideas, except the ones that were plainly wrong, such as his misguided efforts to unify gravity and electromagnetism late in his career. But he was splendidly successful in peeling back Einstein’s public persona to reveal how profoundly human the man was. And he gives credit where credit is due. Ohanian exalts in the discoveries that Einstein’s unique, nearly mystical method (some might say madness) of pondering the universe helped uncover, often doing so by pointing out how some of Einstein’s defective musings were actually helpful along the way (e.g., the Principle of Equivalence), while explaining where Einstein brilliantly and intuitively applied the discoveries of others to push back the frontiers of understanding, such as in the equations and theories propounded in General Relativity.
I wish I understood the mathematical explanations of Special and General Relativity better than I do. In my own humble quest to fashion a functional understanding of the universe and the life within it, I have stumbled over each theory multiple times. Each seems pregnant with logical inconsistencies, but I have not applied myself sufficiently to their mathematical explications to get at what might be their source, or to figure out why my instincts are wrong.
Ohanian starts Einstein’s Mistakes with a humorous, if somewhat disturbing, anecdote about a yachtsman who went mad while in a race around the world because Einstein simply stipulated in Relativity, The Special and General Theory that light had the same speed no matter in which direction it was measured, i.e., without accounting for the rotation of the earth, etc. The yachtsman was becalmed in the Atlantic, actually intentionally; he was wasting time because of a strategy he had devised to cheat his way to victory, when he pulled out Einstein’s book to pass the time. He never got past the stipulation, which Einstein had “proclaimed of [his] own free will in order to arrive at a definition of simultaneity.” Obviously, no scientist serious about discovering the nature of reality can simply stipulate the universe behave as he likes. Ohanian provides that Einstein was mistaken in procedure, but not in outcome, as the phenomenon has been experimentally proved.
But this extraordinary claim that the speed of light always appears the same to all observers, no matter their acceleration or motion in relation to it, seems illogical to me. How could something used as the ultimate speed limit for the universe (as is light for the theories), that always has the same speed no matter its relation to the observer, have any speed at all? Speed, velocity, acceleration, i.e., motion is a relative concept. Movement without context is not movement. Movement is always in relation to something else. The speed at which my fingers move over this keypad can be measured against the relatively invariant motion of the computer, desk, room, house, etc. that provide the contextual framework for saying that they move. How can something for which the context of movement is meaningless, as is light with its absolute velocity, no matter the velocity of the observer doing the measuring, be considered to be moving at all? If light always travels the same speed for every observer, how then is it moving? With its velocity constant in all contexts, how can its velocity ever be measured? I fail to grasp it.
David Bohm, in his excellent primer, The Special Theory of Relativity, states that the validity of Special and General Relativity hinge on light being the fastest known entity in the universe:
But there is no known signal that can go faster than light. Moreover, as we shall see later, the theory of relativity implies that such a signal is not possible in the sense that the assumption that such a signal is possible leads to a contradiction with the theory of relativity. (emphasis Bohm’s).
But what of entangled particles? It has been experimentally proved that when two particles become “entangled”, i.e., counter-poised in spin or some other attribute, the changing of one particle changes, automatically and instantaneously, the other. Is this not a signal, in the sense that Bohm describes, that is faster than the speed of light?
It gets even more confusing when it is considered that a light source traveling away from an observer exhibits something of a Doppler effect, extending the frequency of the light rays in a “red-shift” much as the pitch of a passing train changes from high to low as frequency of the sound waves it generates are compressed and then expanded. How does light, whose speed is purportedly the same for all observers, undergo the same Doppler effect as a sound wave, whose speed of propagation we know to be explicable by plain old Newtonian physics?
The Special Theory of Relativity has its origins in attempts to solve the problem of clock synchronization. Clock synchronization presented marvelous conundrums for theoretical physicists, but very little in the way of practical difficulties. All one had to do, even in Einstein’s day, was do as I and my helicopter-flying comrades did before a mission—have everyone meet and synchronize their watches at the same time and place. But it presented such theoretical difficulties that the clock synchronization problem transformed into a bigger issue over the notion of whether an ether thought to encompass the universe really existed; Special Relativity was specifically intended to eliminate the ether. Abraham Michelson, the main proponent of the ether hypothesis at the end of the nineteenth century, continued to believe in it until his death, even after no effects of it could be experimentally detected. Ohanian quotes him lamenting, “But without a medium, how can the propagation of light waves be explained?…How explain the constancy of propagation, the fundamental assumption…if there be no medium?” I suppose I’m a throwback. Like Michelson, I just don’t get how light has speed except in relation to something else, and according to the theory of Special Relativity, no matter what the something else happens to be, the speed of light is the same.
Of all Einstein’s blunders, the most famous must be the cosmological constant he inserted into his equations for General Relativity when it turned out his theory implied the universe was not static as he believed it to be. Ohanian disagrees that it was his “biggest blunder” as Einstein described it, observing that Einstein was mistaken only because he got the magnitude wrong, which is true. The evidence for an accelerating universe compelled reinsertion of the term, but at a higher value, that now provides that most of the universe must be composed of dark matter and energy (together, roughly 96%) that is not detectable, except for its accelerating effect, in any meaningful way. Shades of ether?
I think Einstein was correct in his assertion that the cosmological constant was his biggest blunder. That he so fastidiously believed, on the basis of no evidence, the universe to be static such that he made up a number and inserted in his equations to keep his universe still, speaks to a latent character flaw that was further revealed in his rejection of probabilistically determined outcomes in quantum theory. Quite apart from his role as a radical, mystical theoretician capable of seeing implications where others did not, Einstein insisted that the universe behave in the manner he wished, and stubbornly refused to accept that it might be dynamic and probabilistic. His cosmological constant quandary is more understandable, given the limited evidence at the time; his refusal to accept the tenets of quantum theory, not so much.
God does play dice with the universe at the quantum level, and does quite a few other very eerie things, like entangling particles in such a way that they instantaneously know what their partner is doing at all times. Einstein (in a paper written with Podolsky and Rosen, which gave rise to what came to be known as the EPR paradox) in fact attempted to disprove the Uncertainty Principle in quantum theory by an experiment with entangled particles, showing that the position of a particle, and its momentum, could be simultaneously known. If two particles in quantum correlation are sent scurrying in different directions at identical momentum, EPR proposed that the position and momentum of one could be determined by the measurement of the other. Which may or may not have been true for the EPR experimenters, but the idea of quantum entanglement , as I pointed out previously, seems to contradict the foundational notion of Special and General Relativity that no information can travel faster than the speed of light. If EPR is correct, as further experimental evidence seems to confirm (particularly by the Scottish physicist John Bell), then relativity is suspect.
Don’t misunderstand. I do not dispute the central premise of relativity: Objective understanding of reality requires understanding the subjective conditions from which it is perceived. This notion is Einstein’s greatest contribution to the advancement of human understanding. Everything we perceive is done so subjectively. We can not escape the prison of our perceptual biases except through understanding from whence they arise. Radical objectivity requires educated subjectivity.
Do you remember as a child when you learned for the first time that the earth was round and spun like a top around an axis of rotation? It was undoubtedly explained to you that the rotation of the earth around its axis caused night and day, and it was probably further explained that, as the earth was rotating on its axis, it was also circling the sun, hurtling through space at fantastic speeds to complete its elliptical orbit, and that this trek through the heavens caused winter and summer, autumn and spring. Did you then wonder why none of the motion was perceptible to you?
You may have thought a lot of things about why you couldn’t feel the earth move. You may have guessed at explanations for the apparent permanence you noticed around you, though in the back of your mind, you knew that everything was always in flux, because you innately knew that the earth and the sun and the moon and you were all constantly moving in relation to one another. You could see it every day, but more importantly, you were born with this knowledge in your bones. You only abandoned the truth of impermanence because assuming permanence in structures and things was more advantageous to survival than understanding their inherent transience. This understanding of the subjective nature of observations is the basis of relativity. Relativity is a return to childhood. Space, time, mass and energy are not fixed quantities. You knew this before you were conditioned to forget it. These are dynamic, subjectively-determined entities. Nothing is fixed. Flux is permanent.
This awareness of subjective bias is critical in breaking through to an understanding of objective truth. It is as true in physics as it is in understanding the daily flux of human society. We all like to think, because we’ve been conditioned to do so, that our societal customs and mores arise from some permanent foundation; that changes sweeping through society do not reveal a permanent state of change and flux, but are instead a deviation from some normal pattern to which we’ve grown accustomed. This is only because we have forgotten our original basis for understanding. When we were children, we innately understood that reality is forever in a constant state of fluctuation. Relativity came naturally then. As adults, its truths are only acknowledged when reality forcefully impresses them upon us. Understanding human history, like understanding particle history, helps immensely in stripping away the subjective biases with which we are afflicted.
Einstein’s Mistakes is a marvelous examination of the life and times of a man who pushed outward the frontiers of human understanding. Though I don’t understand the details of the physics as well as I would like, it helped immensely in my ragged, meandering journey seeking truth and understanding. I highly recommend it.